A Singer Whose Context Is ‘Love and Heart’

SEATTLE — The day in May 2012 that Mary Lambert received the phone call inviting her to collaborate with the hip-hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, she popped a bottle of Champagne with a saber, kissed the picture of President Obama in her house here, and set to work.

Six months earlier, she’d given herself two years to focus on her music career before going to graduate school to become a teacher. Until then, she’d been singing coffeehouse folk pop and had also found success as a spoken-word poet tackling deeply personal subject matter.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis found Ms. Lambert through common Seattle friends and asked her to contribute to“Same Love,” a hip-hop anthem about gay rights and marriage equality. For Ms. Lambert, who is gay, it represented an opportunity to bring all her worlds together: “The very pragmatic part of the song was there, but I wanted to provide a context of love and heart — that’s sort of my thing.”

She said this in an interview at the Avast! Recording Company, the studio here where she was working on arrangements for “Bloom,” the song that she hopes will move her beyond the long shadow cast by “Same Love,” which went to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 last summer, catapulting Ms. Lambert, who is 24, far beyond local renown.

She has sung the song on tour with Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, as she will Wednesday through Friday at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. She has sung it on the MTV Video Music Awards, ending in a climactic, vivid face-off with Jennifer Hudson. Sometimes, when she hears it on the radio, she changes the station, “which I never thought I would do,” she said with a gasp.

And she used the chorus of “Same Love” as the foundation for “She Keeps Me Warm,” her own single, which has sold tens of thousands of copies of its own, even though she made it reluctantly. “I didn’t want to make the song, but I knew there was a need for it,” said Ms. Lambert, who disarms with directness and genuine good cheer.

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Mary Lambert at the Best Buy Theater.CreditChad Batka for The New York Times

The tender “She Keeps Me Warm” takes the conceit of “Same Love” and reclaims it for Ms. Lambert. Implicitly, it also moves the conversation about gay rights out of the mouth of a straight artist. Ms. Lambert, though, is sensitive about the criticisms of “Same Love”: that Macklemore was, in essence, straight-splaining, hogging the platform to talk about oppression through the lens of, and by virtue of, his own privilege.

“I heard the track go through some changes — where he was originally going to do this from a 13-year-old gay boy’s perspective, to edit himself and say ‘No, no, this is not the way to do it,’ ” she said. “He’s so aware of his privilege.”

It didn’t help, though, that when she went onstage with the duo to accept the prize at the Video Music Awards for best video with a social message, Ms. Lambert didn’t speak. “A part of me kind of retreated,” she acknowledged.

But otherwise, her learning curve has been steep, her confidence ascendant. She originally didn’t receive any songwriting royalties for “Same Love,” but her contract was amended after the initial success of the song. She recently split with her girlfriend of three years, a difficult choice, but one that reflected her newfound maturity, allowing her to move beyond old “codependent” ways of being. “I’ve never been so independent in my life,” she said.

She grew up poor in Everett, Wash., was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and went through a period of drug and alcohol abuse, a time, she said, when she was struggling to come to terms with a series of traumas, including a gang rape at 17, and a pattern of molestation by her father when she was a small child.

She now deals directly with these things through her art, especially her poetry, some of which she collected in a recent chapbook, “500 tips for fat girls,” full of severe and humane poems.

She also uses her poetry during her live shows, to devastating effect. “I want to create a safe space for people to feel like they can access these things that they don’t usually access, which is a lot to ask for at a show,” Ms. Lambert says, describing her concerts as places of “mutual health and nourishment.”

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The singer-songwriter Mary Lambert is bringing her music and poetry to New York this week.CreditChad Batka for The New York Times

That was clear when she played the Best Buy Theater in New York last month, opening for the poet Andrea Gibson. She began her set by teasing the crowd: “Tell me how nice I look. Validate me.” After a half-hour of soul-scraping poetry and song about rape and body image and sweet affection, she told the crowd, “Thanks for letting me cry at you.”

(She will perform a pair of solo shows on Saturday at SubCulture in Greenwich Village.)

Whether that sort of intensity will continue to be possible as the crowds get bigger remains one of Ms. Lambert’s challenges. She is at work on her first EP for Capitol Records, the label with which she recently signed, working with Eric Rosse, who has produced Tori Amos and Sara Bareilles. She was recording “Bloom” at Avast! — where Death Cab for Cutie and Fleet Foxes have worked — with Shawn Simmons, who’s produced for the Head and the Heart.

Though she has been ubiquitous, thanks to the success of “Same Love,” Ms. Lambert is still a rarity: an openly gay artist with a major-label deal. She says she looks to contemporary gay artists like Brandi Carlile and Tegan & Sara for templates on how to balance the need for identity politics with the exigencies of the music industry.

Thematically, though, especially where her poetry and music intersect, she has far more in common with the confessional artists of the 1990s, like Ms. Amos and Fiona Apple. Her EP will be sandwiched with her poem “I know girls (bodylove),” a sharp tract about self-image.

As a singer, Ms. Lambert has a lovely voice that also has a bit of growl to it, which she deploys selectively. And she’s not scared of sweetness. Moving forward, she wants to address as wide an audience as possible. “Bloom” began life as “I’d Be Your Wife,” which Ms. Lambert wrote about her girlfriend at the time. But the pronouns in the new version are gender-neutral.

In large part, though, Ms. Lambert’s quick success has to do with an evolving social climate that favors specificity. Without writing so directly about the particulars of her experience, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to choose neutrality.

So, even if “Same Love” is, in some ways, an albatross, it is a magical one. Two years ago, Ms. Lambert created a Kickstarter campaign to finance her debut EP, and she included, as a reward, the chance to be her guest at the Grammys for a donation of $1,000. “i’m not joking,” she wrote. “get on this now. it could be next year. or five years. but it’s happening.”

No one bought that prize, but it seems a lot less crazy in retrospect.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Singer Whose Context Is ‘Love and Heart’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe